Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday September 13, 2013 @10:10AM
from the surely-you're-joking dept.

Dr. Richard Feynman's lectures on physics have been iconic standards of physics education for the past five decades. Videos of the series were put online at Microsoft Research a few years ago, but now the entirety of Volume 1 is available over simple HTML (mirror). In a letter to members of the Feynman Lectures Forum, editor Mike Gottlieb said, "It was an idea conceived many years ago, when through FL website correspondence I became aware of the many eager young minds who could benefit from reading FLP, who want to read it, but for economic or other reasons have no access to it, while at the same time I was becoming aware of the growing popularity of horrid scanned copies of old editions of FLP circulating on file-sharing and torrent websites. A free high-quality online edition was my proposed solution to both problems. All concerned agreed on the potential pedagogical benefits, but also had to be convinced that book sales would not be harmed. The conversion from LaTeX to HTML was expensive: we raised considerable funds, but ran out before finishing Volumes II and III, so we are only posting Volume I initially. (I am working on finishing Volumes II and III myself, as time permits, and will start posting chapters in the not-too-distant future, if all goes as planned.)"

They have the agreement of the print publisher to produce this free online version. I'm actually somewhat surprised they got it; as the summary notes, they had to convince the publisher that having a free version available online wouldn't hurt print sales, which is often hard to convince publishers of.

The thank-you section of the page lists:

Thomas Kelleher and Basic Books, for their open-mindedness in allowing this edition to be published free of charge

This page [caltech.edu] says Caltech holds the copyright. Presumably they require(d) that faculty transfer copyright of works they did in the course of their employment to the university. My guess is that's probably standard provision for faculty, though I'm not positive.

I don't know what the policy was when Feynman made that, but Caltech's copyright policy was (and still looks like) that copyright of books, papers, written work, and stuff related to classes remain with the author unless specifically funded by Caltech (above and beyond simply being an employee there). And when they do get the copyright, you get a portion of the royalties, or can chose to donate a portion of your share to research in a field you specify, and Caltech will match your contribution from their p

They have the agreement of the print publisher to produce this free online version. I'm actually somewhat surprised they got it; as the summary notes, they had to convince the publisher that having a free version available online wouldn't hurt print sales, which is often hard to convince publishers of.

The thank-you section of the page lists:Thomas Kelleher and Basic Books, for their open-mindedness in allowing this edition to be published free of charge

I guess it also helps that it isn't a book that's been published recently - being an older title, sales are probably thin to begin with. An online copy can easily be a good marketing mechanism in that case.

Still is #55,812 rank in Amazon book sales and that is just for the 2011 3-book commemorative set! I'm sure that this clear and somewhat comprehensive physics treatise will sell well long after I'm gone!

I'll get to the copyright in a minute. But there is actually a huge bit of inaccuracy in the post. The videos at Microsoft research in *NOT* the Feynman lectures on physics. Those are actually a part of the Messenger Lectures recorded at Cornell in 1964 called "The Character of Physical Law" and preceded the Cal Tech undergraduate physics lectures which we now know as the Feynman Lectures on Physics.

Bill Gates has long been a fan of the lesser known Messenger Lectures. As part of the drive to popularize Silverlight, he actually acquired the rights to "The Character of Physical Law" in order to be able to present them to the public using the Silverlight platform at Project Tuva. Not a bad move for like minded Feynman fans like me.

So why can't you just print the pages out to PDF? Would the result be considered "not good quality" PDF?

Nah... a printed web page will only print even remotely close to the quality of a real typeset book if a lot of effort was expended on creating CSS specifically for printing, and even then you probably can't get even all that good. (Could you even get a table of contents with page numbers? I dunno.) And that basically means that it wouldn't happen.

One could cut-n-paste the text from the web page into a LaTeX skeleton document and process the file as you would any other LaTeX document. (After editing to put in proper LaTeX chapter/section/subsection/figure/includegraphics/etc. markup tags, that is.) It would be a fair amount of work but doable for the motivated but cash-strapped (and ethically challenged) student.

I'm not the publisher, so you'd have to ask them. My intuition is that a downloadable e-book (like e-pub format) would be a bigger cannibalization of the sale market than a good PDF that was formatted for normal-sized paper (or the larger-than-letter size that, IIRC, the Feynman lectures are printed on). I doubt they'd be willing to do a DRM-free version, as awesome as that would be.

Though it does bring up the idea that they might be missing a possibility of putting a Kindle edition (or another DRM'd versio

You would deprive a fellow latex user of his easy exploitation of the ignorant who refuse to learn computing, whilst they also convince the publisher high quality online versions will not hurt sales?

Personally, I hope they extract every last dime they can by running a terminal command and farting about the web for the other 8 hours of the day. However, I'm sure it has more to do with web formatting and hosting, links and other such things than getting paid to do nothing.

Because the good PDFs would harm the sales of the printed volumes. The HTML forms are better than bad scans, but not good enough to be printed out (like a high quality PDF) by folks who wish to capitalize in copyright infringement.

PDFs are static in the sense that you can't change the page dimensions once you create the PDF. Imagine, if the PDFs were created in book format (2-up) and you had scroll up and down to read the the text. The problem would be worse for people on the move who have to use tablets. OTOH HTML..
The drawback with pure HTML (just HTML) is that it's not possible to bookmark a page.
In the balance, I would prefer HTML.
OK

I assume this was expensive because TeX4ht wasn't up to the task. Was TeX4ht used as a starting point for the conversion tool? Is someone now maintaining an updated TeX4ht? Is the converter available in CTAN?

Surely you didn't spend all this money having people manually convert one structural markup language to another, instead of investing in tools to do it automatically, right?

Editing is more than just conversion or reformatting - it's also ensuring that the conversion/reformatting operated correctly and did not induce any errors snd that the process produced reasonable and useful output in the target format. (I.E. leave it Slashdot to concentrate on the 1% of the task that can be automated.) Editing is one of those thankless tasks, because done right it's invisible.

Afaict the problem is a practical latex document is likely to use a mixture of structural constants, "just put this where I damn well tell you to" constructs and constructs that while nominally strutural are being tweaked to make things look good on the printed page (for example moving a figure up or down in the text so it ends up on the page you want it on).

An automated conversion is likely to produce something that is just about readable but a high quality conversion is likely to require human judgement.

The equations aren't actually in MathML; they're in TeX. They're converted to a version renderable in your browser on the fly via MathJax (a big pile of Javascript). In some browsers that will result in presentation MathML output (but not semantic MathML).

Man this takes me back - it's just like the good old days of/., when we'd all head over to some small, random site and/. it. A nice, well-meaning site that had no idea about the tsunami of visitors they were about to be inundated with. Yep, those were good times:)

In addition to being a great physicist, Richard Feynman was also quite funny and a pretty big troublemaker in his day. What a great guy. If you get a chance, the book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" is well worth the read.

I wanted to say pretty much this, his autobiography is a great read. What a character. There's also a really worthwhile BBC-produced dramatization of his involvement in the Challenger [bbc.co.uk] investigation. William Hurt does a really good job portraying the great man, IMHO.

rs1n [slashdot.org] and I [slashdot.org] both speculate that the reason they don't just release PDFs from the Latex source is that the publisher feels that would compromise physical book sales (and HTML doesn't).

I wonder how much the rights holders would want to release the Feynman Lectures into the public domain, or a CC license that will ensure free access to this text.

After all, the Feynman Lectures cannot be that valuable to them. While it is widely recognised, it is definitely directed towards people specializing in physics and engineering. As far as I know it's rarely used as a course text either (age, lack of supporting curricular materials, etc.).

If you want to get technical, yes; he makes the logical assumption that there exists some objective reality, and that human perceptions are correlated to that reality. That's kind of the whole basis for the study of physics.

Have there been any discoveries in physics in the nearly fifty years since its publication that make any of the lectures, well, less than correct? Or can the intrepid autodidact dive right in and take it all at face value?

I just read the chapter on symmetry, and that is a bit out of date in that while it correctly explains that parity symmetry is broken, it still incorrectly claims that parity-charge symmetry holds, which we now know is false.

The lectures are very educational and engagingly written, so I recommend that you give it a go anyway. If you take it all on face value, you will end up with only a very few, minor misunderstandings.

The original post refers to the videos being available. This seems to be a common error. The link points to the Messenger Lectures given at Cornell in 1965(?). As far as I know, the videos are not (legally) available online.

I couldn't tell you where the link points as Microsoft appears to be playing toddler games with Google again. I'm getting a screen cap of the Silverlight with the message "Sorry, Silverlight for your browser is not officially supported." Of course I have Silverlight for Chrome installed. Click on the link provided and am told:

The version of Silverlight installed is:
Silverlight 5 (5.1.20513.0)
You are ready to use Microsoft Silverlight

LaTeX to bystroTeX [freecode.com] should be easy, although I do not yet have a working converter. BystroTeX [freecode.com] produces HTML. The syntax of bystroTeX is Racket Scribble [racket-lang.org], it is very similar to LaTeX so writing a converter should be more or less straightforward.

Hi. I teach undergraduate physics. If you're a clever high school or early college student interested in physics, you may have heard of Feynman, and you may have heard physics people give rave reviews of the Feynman lectures. And hey, he intended these lectures as a first-year college physics course, so that's perfect for you, right?

Wrong. This is not the right place to start learning physics. Feynman has some beautiful insights about how introductory physics concepts connect to "real" modern physics, and a way of cutting through the red tape to elegantly explain concepts in ways that make experienced physicists drool. But that's not what you need. You need the red tape. You need to learn to apply concepts to real situations, you need to get buried in the algebra, trig and calculus and dig your way back out again. Feynman won't help you about that.

Feynman's Lectures on Physics represent how an experienced modern physicist would teach introductory physics to a roomful of other professional physicists. Feynman was a genius, but his lectures are designed to impress, not to teach. You should absolutely read it, and you will love it, later in your career. But start with a more traditional textbook.

Bruce Sherwood, who taught a course using the Feynman Lectures as a textbook, has some interesting comments, saying that it went quite well for him.http://matterandinteractions.wordpress.com/2012/10/01/the-feynman-lectures-as-textbook/

You are correct that Feynman's books are insufficient to learn introductory physics, but the lectures were only one part of the curriculum. From Feynman's Preface:

"The lectures form only part of the complete course. The whole group of 180 students gathered in a big lecture room twice a week to hear these lectures and then broke up into small groups of 15 to 20 students in recitation sections under the guidance of a teaching assistance. In addition, there was a laboratory section each week...

I didn't get the impression that the OP in this discussion was trying to censor anyone. I think he was emphasising the lack of mathematical rigour ("red tape") in Feynman's presentation; particularly his reliance upon intuition rather than derivation. If you've ever heard undergraduates trying to reason about things like general relativity using poor metaphors like the bowling-ball-on-a-trampoline model, you rapidly realise how important the mathematical framework is. You HAVE heard undergraduates do thi

I'm not the OP, but Google for "Leonard Susskind: Theoretical Minimum" for a great set of courses (they're on YouTube, iTunesU, etc.). You can also find guides for the more advanced areas---General Relativity, for example---on sites like arXiv (although they're not connected in any way with Susskind's lectures, they make a great adjunct).

Despite the accolades from some, Feynman's lectures are far from clear and perfect. What would be more exciting is a collaborative website for adding comments to this online version to work through the kinks.

The other coefficients are only a little more difficult. To find them we can use a trick discovered by Fourier. Suppose we multiply both sides of Eq. (50.2) by some harmonic functionâ"say by $\cos7\omega t$. We have then \begin{alignat}{2} f(t)\cdot\cos7\omega t &= a_0\cdot\cos7\omega t\notag\\ &\quad + a_1\cos\hphantom{1}\omega t\cdot\cos7\omega t &&+ b_1\sin\hphantom{1}\omega t\cdot\cos7\omega t\notag\\ &\quad + a_2\cos2\omega t\cdot\cos7\omega t &

Nah, that's Einstein. He got lucky once and stole Olinto De Pretto's formula, but after that? Feynman was working all the time.

De Pretto figured out (or perhaps made a lucky guess) based on his understanding of the lumineferous aether. Einstein derived it from his special theory of relativity. Einstein presented E=mc^2 in a followup letter to his paper "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" (i.e. it's an interesting derivation, not an essential part of the theory). There was also the photoelectric effect and general relativity. Of the three, special relativity is arguably his least impressive work (Lorentz, et al, were also working towards it).

Of the three, special relativity is arguably his least impressive work

Exactly. I mean, his Nobel prize wasn't even for relativity -- it was largely for his explanation of the photoelectric effect, which basically spawned quantum physics. He already had earned his Nobel before he even published E=mc^2.

Calling Einstein a one-trick pony is using an awfully liberal definition of "once".

And frankly calling Einstein a one trick pony shows how fucking little you know of the man's scientific achievements.

That... was kind of my point. I was addressing AC's down-voted comment that "He got lucky once and stole Olinto De Pretto's formula, but after that?" which is so blatantly BS that I called it out in... perhaps too much of an understated manner.:-)

(It occurred to me just after I hit submit that, just as I assumed that you misinterpreted me, I may have misinterpreted you and you didn't mean to say that I was, in fact, calling him a one-trick pony. If true, I apologize, and hopefully we can stop talking past one another.:-))

Also AC's comment wasn't down-voted, I was thinking of his/her parent, the originator of this thread.

The thing that strikes me about special relativity is how he discarded the notions of space and time that had been fundamental for centuries. It may have been the least impressive from the point of view of mathematical development, but I'm very impressed by the willingness to change large parts of the foundations of physics.

Einstein's first paper on relativity was published three months after Poincare's short paper, but before Poincare's longer version. Einstein relied on the principle of relativity to derive the Lorentz transformations and used a similar clock synchronisation procedure (Einstein synchronisation) to the one that Poincare (1900) had described, but Einstein's was remarkable in that it contained no references at all. Poincare never acknowledged Einstein's work on special relativity. Einstein acknowledged Poincare posthumously in the text of a lecture in 1921 called Geometrie und Erfahrung in connection with non-Euclidean geometry, but not in connection with special relativity. A few years before his death, Einstein commented on Poincare as being one of the pioneers of relativity, saying "Lorentz had already recognised that the transformation named after him is essential for the analysis of Maxwell's equations, and Poincare deepened this insight still further...."

Yes! The Feynman lectures are interesting, but I think that Leonard Susskind's lectures are much more clear. Susskind also addresses General Relativity in a more conventional way, without predicating the whole exercise in electrodynamics. Susskind's approach places more emphasis on the underlying geometry, centred around the metric tensor, and is appropriate across multiple applications of continuum mechanics. I think that the Feynman approach is better for those who already have a decent grasp of GR.

No. Not over-rated. He was capable of communicating ideas, deep and otherwise, clearly, which is very difficult. Consider how to convey the difference in magnitude between gravity and the electromagnetic force. The example he gives goes something like this:

RF: What is your charge right now?

Student: neutral.

RF: Why?

Student: Because we have the same amount of positive and negative charge.

RF: OK. What would happen if you took some electrons from your neighbour?

Student: I would become positive and he would be negative

RF: Yes. Now I want you to imagine you steal some of the electrons from your neighbor. Let's not be greedy. Let's say you take 10% of them. Now you are negative and your friend is positive and you will feel an attractive force towards him. The question is: how strong is the force of attraction. Is it larger or smaller than the weight of the Empire State Building?

Student: Hmmmm...dunno. I'm gonna guess larger.

RF: Yes it is larger. But how much larger. Is the force of attraction between you and your neighbor larger or smaller than the weight of Mount Everest?

Student: I'm gonna go with larger.

RF: Yes, you are correct. In fact, the force of attaction between you and your neighbor WILL BE ABOUT THE SAME AS THE WEIGHT OF THE ENTIRE EARTH!

The above paraphrased lesson emphasizes like nothing I've ever heard before how weak gravity is and how strong the electromagnetic force is. Simply brilliant.